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Lauralee Bell is opening up about being just a teenager when she began her role on The Young and the Restless — and how “intense” her storylines were.
Bell, 56, debuted on the show — which was created by her parents, William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell — in 1983 as a teen model named Cricket who was involved in a storyline in which her mother, Jessica, died from AIDS.
Speaking to soap stars Rebecca Budig and Greg Rikaart on the latest episode of the CBS podcast Soapy, Bell said it felt nice to have a fictional mother on set — and sad to ultimately lose her.
“It was intense because I finally had a mother, which was really sweet, and she felt all of this responsibility…to go that accurate route,” Bell said. “And to have her go was really emotional.”
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And while she described herself as “super awkward” when she joined the cast at age 14, she noted that she was proud to be part of a show that was breaking barriers.
“We were doing summer storylines that were like, you know, date rape, and my [character’s] mother died of AIDS. And so, especially with the date rape storyline, I felt, first of all, no one was talking about this. So it was so great that we were not only going to bring light to it and try and help anyone that we possibly could, but there was so much responsibility. Like, we have to do this right.”
Bell added that the AIDs storyline (which aired in the late 1980s) meant that she was often the recipient of fan mail from those who were also affected by the virus: “To get the fan mail, I just had to keep reiterating, ‘My heart aches for you,’ and I portrayed that, but … I can only imagine what [they] went through, so it’s so so hard.”
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Bell also touched on the difficulties of acting in a dramatic storyline while the other young actors around her were having a little more fun.
While other young actors’ characters were “frolicking in a barn,” Bell said her character was grappling with the more intense storylines.
“I was a little jealous of that, but at the end of each summer, my father was always right. Even though there was some preaching in there, the audience trusted us as characters and listened. If we were able to help two or 200, it was worth it,” she said.
She added that the AIDS storyline, in particular, brought about “a lot of mixed emotions” — in large part because the virus impacted a female character. “I think the best thing we could do is just show that, you know, life is life. People are people. Things happen to everybody.”
